This is a timelapse video of the Light Brigade workshop run by the BuildBrighton hackerspace as part of the White Night festivities.
The workshop involved soldering together a badge consisting of an RGB LED, a microcontroller, battery, IR LED and IR receiver. The badges have a unique ID which is represented as a colour on the LED. They constantly transmit their ID using IR, other badges can receive the transmissions and collect colours which they cycle through on the RGB LED. They also have a zombie game mode where a badge can become "infected" and flashes red. It will then infect all other badges that receive its transmissions.
It was far more popular than we anticipated, some people waiting over an hour for a place and many being turned away. A lot of work went into it, particularly from Mike and Matt and I think it was very successful, people seemed to enjoy it. I saw several people who’d never soldered before pick it up and walk away proud of the flashy badge they’d just made.
This video covers 19:05 until 21:20 and includes some of the setup (you can watch Toby and Mike working on the code and us eating our dinner) and the first session. It was made from 1776 shots taken with a Canon Powershot S2 running CHDK, then made into a video with ffmpeg.